KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (95 page)

COERCED COMMUNITIES

Inmates had to be resourceful to stand any chance of survival during the war, developing what one prisoner called “camp technique.”
13
They had to make the most of their existing skills, and acquire new ones, to gain life-saving advantages; a multilingual prisoner might get a privileged position as a translator, while a talented painter might sell his drawings for food.
14
The perseverance of individual
prisoners included rituals to preserve their pre-camp identities. For Primo Levi, his daily wash was less about getting clean—impossible in the filthy surroundings—than about staying human.
15
Other prisoners found solace in religion. God had saved her from losing her mind, a Polish woman testified soon after the war, when she recalled her arrival in Ravensbrück in autumn 1944.
16
Some prisoners
also sought strength in art and the life of the mind, recalling old books, poems, and stories. In Ravensbrück, Charlotte Delbo swapped her bread ration for a copy of Molière’s
Le Misanthrope
, and then memorized the lines, a few each day. Silently reciting the play to herself “lasted almost throughout roll call,” she later wrote.
17

Important as individual perseverance was, however, no prisoner
could get through the KL alone. The camps were social spaces and inmates always interacted with others. Their fate was shaped, to a large degree, by their place within what the Auschwitz survivor H. G. Adler has called the “coerced community.”
18
Without solidarity, an Auschwitz Kapo told a group of new arrivals in late March 1942, they would all be dead within two months.
19

Some prisoner groups
were created by the SS, others by common inmate interests and backgrounds. Some dated back to the prisoners’ pre-KL lives; others emerged inside. Some were loose and transitory; others were permanent and closed to outsiders. To complicate matters, prisoners always belonged to more than one group. Primo Levi, for example, was an educated, atheist Jew from Italy, and each of these aspects of his
selfhood shaped his social relations in Auschwitz.
20

Companionship—whether based on sympathy or pragmatism, chance or shared beliefs—was vital for all prisoners. But it was a double-edged sword, since it created discord, as well. Relations between inmates thrown together by fate, like those who found themselves in the same barrack or work detail, often proved volatile. More generally, solidarity
among some prisoners could cause conflicts with others. In the end, every prisoner faced the same paradox: how to lead a social life in the unsocial environment of the KL?
21

Families and Friends

“
We depended on each other,” Elie Wiesel wrote about the relationship with his father in Auschwitz; “he needed me as I needed him.” Sometimes they shared a few spoonfuls of soup or bread, and they gave
each other moral sustenance, too. “He was my support and my oxygen, as I was his.”
22
Wiesel was not alone. In the inferno of the camps, many prisoners formed close bonds with relatives, since trust was an essential element in their social relations. This was true, in particular, for Jews and Gypsies, who were frequently deported in large families.
23
They had arrived together, and together they
hoped to stay alive.
24

Other small survival networks, sometimes consisting of no more than a pair of prisoners, were made up of close friends.
25
Many had already known one another before the camp. Hailing from the same towns or cities, their common past and culture provided common ground in the camps. Many more were joined together by shared experiences of Nazi terror, on deportation trains and
building sites, in barracks and infirmaries.
26
Her friendships with other prisoners had helped her to survive, Margarete Buber-Neumann later wrote, and she never had a closer friend in the camps than Milena Jesenská. She met the Czech journalist, who had been arrested after helping others escape from Nazi-occupied Czech territory, in Ravensbrück in 1940, and the two women quickly bonded. They
were kindred spirits and often talked about the past (both had broken with the Communist movement), the present, and the future; Jesenská suggested that they should write a book about camps under Stalin and Hitler, to be called “The Age of the Concentration Camps.” In Ravensbrück, the two women cared for each other as best they could. When Buber-Neumann was thrown into the bunker, her friend smuggled
sugar and bread inside. When Jesenská became gravely ill, her friend secretly visited her every day for several months.
27

Such friendships were widespread in the microcosm of the camps. Many women became so close they even referred to each other as sisters. They formed surrogate families, with up to a dozen or so members, sharing food, clothing, and emotional support, and trying to protect each
other from selections. Being a “camp sister” was a “very happy and invigorating feeling,” Ágnes Rózsa wrote in January 1945. “Whatever happens, we know we can count on each other.”
28
It has often been suggested that female KL prisoners were more likely than men to form such intense friendships.
29
But close companionship was not gendered. Primo Levi, for one, forged a deep connection with another
Italian prisoner called Alberto, also in his early twenties. For months, they slept on the same bunk and they were soon “bound by a tight bond of alliance,” Levi wrote, dividing all additional food they could scrape together (they were only separated when Alberto left on the Auschwitz death march in January 1945, from which he did not return).
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Many male prisoners enjoyed similar friendships,
and while some later felt embarrassed to talk about them, other men had no such hesitation, referring to “sleeping brothers” and “comradeship marriages.”
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In the unforgiving climate of the KL, however, even the closest bonds could be broken, especially among ordinary prisoners, who were always exposed to the full force of the camps.
32
There is no shortage of chilling images from the concentration
camps, but few are as disquieting as those of friends and family robbing one another, and of sons denying their fathers when they pleaded for bread.
33
More generally, mutual aid within small collectives, bound by a strong sense of solidarity, often brought harm to others, intentionally or unintentionally. Each set of prisoners primarily fought for itself, in what Primo Levi termed “we-ism” (as
a collective extension of egotism) and what we might call “groupness.” The success of each individual group in gaining food, cigarettes, or clothing almost inevitably meant that there was less for others to “organize”; sometimes prisoner collectives even stole from one another.
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Then there were all those prisoners who could not form any alliances. This was true, above all, for the
Muselmänner
, the lepers of the camps. These doomed men and women haunted the compounds like ghosts, though there was nothing unworldly about their presence, with their festering wounds and stinking rags. “Everyone was disgusted by them, nobody showed any compassion,” the Auschwitz prisoner Maria Oyrzy
ń
ska recalled. The others stayed away as far as possible, not just out of disgust but for their own self-preservation;
because the
Muselmann
was always in the line of fire—stealing food, evading work, ignoring orders—others were afraid of being punished by association. And so the
Muselmann
died the loneliest death.
35

Most other prisoners knew that uniting with a small group of relatives or friends offered the best hope. Vital as these alliances were, they were always liable to be ripped apart by deportation,
illness, selection, and death. After the slow death of his father, Shlomo, in early 1945 in Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel became indifferent to the hell around him: “nothing touched me anymore.”
36
Margarete Buber-Neumann was equally devastated after Milena Jesenská’s death in May 1944: “I felt very near despair. Life seemed to have no further point.” In the end, she clung on to life, honoring the memory
of her dead friend by writing the book about the camps they had talked about back in Ravensbrück.
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Comrades

The social ties between friends and relatives were rivaled by those emerging from shared beliefs that predated the camps and endured inside.
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Individual left-wing inmates were particularly close, perhaps even more so than before the war, and frequently arranged secret meetings; they
discussed ideological questions, shared the latest news of the war (gleaned from newspapers and hidden radios), and observed working-class traditions by commemorating significant events and singing protest songs.
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Some other political prisoners proved equally committed to their cause. In Kaufering, the dreaded Dachau satellite, a few Zionists even put together an undercover Hebrew newspaper that
called for unity among Jewish inmates and for the creation of a Jewish state.
40
All such communal activities are best understood as self-assertion; together, political prisoners fought against the eradication of their pre-camp identities and drew strength from their collective convictions.
41

Some groups went beyond boosting morale and became survival networks. Political prisoners would share
essential supplies and use their contacts to save others from punishing labor details or transfers to deadly camps. And just as before the war, well-placed captives watched out for comrades among new arrivals, to explain the basic rules and to protect them.
42
This was another case of partial solidarity, with any benefits restricted to selected prisoners. Inmates from other backgrounds were often
excluded as untrustworthy and undeserving; the basic principle, a former prisoner later explained, had been to “put the politicals first!”
43
Sometimes this meant saving one inmate at the expense of others. Helmut Thiemann, a German Communist and Buchenwald Kapo, testified after the war that he and his colleagues had established a special ward in the infirmary just “for our comrades of all nations.”
The Communist Kapos did all they could to help these prisoners, providing them with the best available medication. At the same time, Thiemann added, “we had to be ruthless” against others.
44

The most extreme cases of “groupness” among political prisoners involved so-called victim swaps. This practice took place in several KL and has been documented most fully for Buchenwald. Here, Communist Kapos
in the infirmary protected some comrades from human experiments by altering SS lists, substituting their names for those of other prisoners. This was how “we saved each other,” Thiemann’s colleague Ernst Busse testified after the war, so that “members of our underground organization in the camp could live relatively peacefully.” In the same spirit, Communist Kapos in the Buchenwald labor action
office altered the composition of prisoner transports to satellite camps. They would spare comrades from transfer to a lethal camp like Dora, and dispatch prisoners considered as undesirable and inferior in their place, including criminals, homosexuals, and other social outsiders. “All these negative elements were selected by the national [Communist] groups,” the former prisoner clerk Ji
ř
í
Ž
ák
testified in 1945, “which also identified the positive elements who under no condition were to go on transports.”
Ž
ák was not the only Communist who vigorously defended this practice after the war. “When I have the opportunity to save ten anti-fascist fighters,” Walter Bartel, one of the most senior Buchenwald Communists, insisted in an internal party investigation in East Germany in 1953, “then
I will do it.”
45

Not all political prisoners enjoyed the same protection, of course, since the inmates with the red triangle never formed a homogeneous group. Even among the most committed opponents of the Nazi regime there was plenty of tension. The long-standing antagonism between German Social Democrats and Communists was never fully overcome, while other ideological divisions were still more
pronounced; French nationalists, for example, shared virtually no common ground with Soviet Communists. There was even strife within the same political factions. German Communists clashed among one another about divisive ideological issues, like the Hitler-Stalin pact, and about the correct tactics in the KL. Dissenters were swiftly accused of deviation and excluded from the collective. When German
Communists in Ravensbrück learned that Margarete Buber-Neumann had been a prisoner under Stalin, they branded her a “Trotskyite” and cut her off. Buber-Neumann, for her part, thought that her adversaries were stuck in the past, in the “Communist cloud cuckoo land of 1933.”
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Believers

Early each morning, before the Auschwitz prisoners had to rise, Elie Wiesel and his father left their bunk and
walked to a nearby barrack. Here, a small group of orthodox Jews met to say ritual blessings, sharing a pair of tefillin they had acquired on the black market. Jews faced the greatest obstacles to worship, as they were exposed to the most lethal SS terror. And yet, they found ways to affirm their faith. “Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp,” Wiesel wrote later. “I had seen too much
suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered.”
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Observant KL inmates knew that it was all but impossible to fulfill their religious duties. They had to work during sacred times and break some dietary rules, and also missed prayer books and spiritual guidance from their leaders.
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Still they practiced their beliefs, as best they could, forming close-knit
groups based on shared beliefs. The observance of Christian rituals was particularly widespread among Polish political prisoners, whose faith was often bound up with their national identity. They held secret Sunday services and even smuggled consecrated Hosts into the camps; at least one prisoner received the Holy Communion in the Auschwitz bunker, after others had lowered a Host, tied to a piece
of string, to his cell window.
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